LITERARY FICTION AND POETRY 

MARCH

"Season of the Snake" by Claire Davis (St. Martin's). The award-winning author of "Winter Range" follows up her debut novel with a story about a scientist who tries to escape her grief-stricken past with risky work in Idaho's Hell's Canyon: tracking rattlesnakes.

"Saturday" by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). The latest novel from the Booker Prize-winner concerns a contented neurosurgeon whose life unravels following a minor but consequential car accident in a London roiled by anti-Iraq War protests.

"A Changed Man" by Francine Prose (HarperCollins). From the acerbic, incisive novelist-critic ("Blue Angel") comes a tale of a young neo-Nazi who says he's changed his ways and wants "to save guys like him from becoming guys like him."

"Good Morning and Good Night" by David Wagoner (University of Illinois Press). New work by a prize-winning Seattle poet.

APRIL

"First Hand" by Linda Bierds (Putnam/Marion Wood). Thirty linked poems about Gregor Mendel, monk and genetics pioneer. By the Bainbridge Island writer ("The Seconds").

"Bitter Fruit" by Achmat Dangor (Black Cat). A South African novel about a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing that, for one fragile victim, makes "crimes from the past erupt into present." Nominated for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award.

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin). Foer, who made a big splash with his first novel "Everything Is Illuminated," follows it up with a novel about a 9-year-old "inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist."

"The Ice Queen" by Alice Hoffman (Little, Brown). The popular novelist ("Practical Magic") writes a tale about a small-town librarian whose adventures have only just begun when she's struck by lightning.

"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf). Three former classmates at a private school in the English countryside attempt to unravel their collective pasts.

"The Mermaid Chair" by Sue Monk Kidd (Viking). Kidd, author of "The Secret Life of Bees," sets her new book in a Benedictine monastery on an island off the coast of South Carolina, where an estranged wife and a monk about to take his vows are drawn to each other.

"Small Island" by Andrea Levy (Picador). Winner of the Orange Prize and both the Whitbread Novel Award and Whitbread Book of the Year, this novel by a London writer of Jamaican parentage portrays Jamaican immigrants new to London from four conflicting points of view.

"The Optimists" by Andrew Miller (Harcourt). The British writer ("Oxygen," "Ingenious Pain") delivers a novel about a photojournalist who, reeling from covering a genocidal massacre in Africa, recovers in part by nursing his mentally ill sister back to health in rural England.

"Europe Central" by William T. Vollmann (Viking). A novel that consists of a "series of intertwined paired stories" set in Nazi and Stalinist Europe, by the author of "Rising Up and Rising Down."

"Lighthousekeeping" by Jeanette Winterson (Harcourt). The British lesbian author ("Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit") writes about an orphan taken in by a storytelling lighthouse keeper manning the light at Scotland's Cape Wrath.

MAY

"Zorro" by Isabel Allende (HarperCollins). A novel set in late 18th-century California, explaining how Diego de la Vega, son of a Spanish military man and a Shoshone warrior mother, became the legendary masked man. By the author of "The House of Spirits."

"Acts of Faith" by Philip Caputo (Knopf). A novel by the author of "Horn of Africa" and "A Rumor of War," about "the physical perils and moral crises faced by a group of men and women who try to relieve the suffering caused by war and famine in contemporary Sudan."

"The Hungry Tide" by Amitav Ghosh (Houghton Mifflin). The author of the sweeping historical novel "The Glass Palace" writes the story of two people, an American of Indian descent and an urbane Delhi businessman, whose lives converge on an archipelago of tiny islands off the east coast of India.

"The Dreams" by Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Raymond Stock (American University in Cairo Press). A new collection of short stories, mixing the quotidian with the magical, by the Egyptian Nobel laureate.

"Beyond Black" by Hilary Mantel (Holt). The edgy British writer delivers a tale about a directionless divorcée who winds up becoming the "personal assistant and companion" of an itinerant psychic.

"Glad News from the Natural World" by T.R. Pearson (Simon & Schuster). The Southern author writes a sequel to his debut novel, "A Short History of a Small Place," the digression-prone small-town saga that made his name.

JUNE

"Specimen Days" by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Cunningham's first novel since his Pulitzer Prize-winner, "The Hours," is a triptych of stories in which the same three characters — a young boy, an older man and a young woman — inhabit New York City at three different points in time: the Industrial Revolution, our terror-threatened present, and a New York 150 years in the future "overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth."

"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" by Umberto Eco, translated by Geoffrey Brock (Harcourt). A novel about a Milan rare-book dealer who can recall every book he ever read, but can no longer remember anything about his own life.

"Freddy and Fredericka" by Mark Helprin (Penguin Press). The author of "Memoir from Antproof Case" delivers a new novel about two floundering members of "a most peculiar British royal family" who rise to the occasion when they're parachuted into industrial New Jersey and left to make their own way across America.

"A Long Way Down" by Nick Hornby (Riverhead). A tale by the author of "About a Boy" and "High Fidelity" about four people who, on New Year's Eve, meet on the roof of a London office tower famous for its suicides.

"The Writing on the Wall" by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Counterpoint). A New York City librarian who likes to keep herself to herself finds herself playing by new rules — and having to face her buried past — after the September 11 attacks on her city. By the gifted writer-translator.

"Blinding Light" by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin). The veteran novelist ("The Mosquito Coast," "Hotel Honolulu") weighs in with a novel about an author who seeks and finds a hallucinogenic cure to writer's block — only to find that it periodically blinds him, as well as giving him visions.

JULY

"Until I Find You" by John Irving (Random House). A hefty new novel by the author of "The World According to Garp." Its hero: a Hollywood actor whose mother was a Toronto tattoo artist and whose missing father was a church organist "addicted to being tattooed."

AUGUST

"Here Is Where We Meet" by John Berger (Pantheon). The British Booker Prize-winner ("G.") delivers a novel in which a narrator named John meets his long-dead mother who extracts a promise from him that he'll start paying more attention to the dead.

"The Summer He Didn't Die" by Jim Harrison (Atlantic Monthly Press). A collection of three novellas by the Michigan author of "Legends of the Fall" and "True North."

"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf). The prize-winning author ("All the Pretty Horses") returns to Tex-Mex border country, with a novel about a man found shot dead near the Rio Grande.

"The Time of the Uprooted" by Elie Wiesel (Knopf). The new novel by the author of "Night" follows the life of a Jewish refugee-exile who fled Czechoslovakia as a boy in 1939, eventually reaching New York where he becomes a ghost writer and part of a community of exiles.

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